Review: The Woman Clothed in the Sun with the Moon under her Feet by David McGuff, Yellow Lab Productions, Kerrville
by Donna Provencher

 

What David McGuff is aiming to do with Yellow Lab Productions is nothing short of a Hill Country revolution — and by nearly every metric, in this production he’s hit his mark admirably.

 

Yellow Lab, less than a decade old, markets itself as a fringe theater company focused on edgier or more provocative work not often tackled by local companies. Past productions include Equus, Misery and The Pillowman, all infrequent visitors to Central Texas stages. 

 

Its latest ambitious endeavor, A Woman Clothed in the Sun With the Moon Under Her Feet, written by and featuring McGuff himself, was presented in the VK Garage Theater of peer Kerrville production company Playhouse 2000. McGuff said afterward that he hopes to tackle still more potent and hard-hitting pieces with the company he’s building.

 

It’s an incisive, piercing look at Mark Twain’s last years juxtaposed with the waning days of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy. On paper, it’s a complex premise that maybe shouldn’t work. But work it does, and beautifully, too, as a penetrating look at grief and loss seen through two lenses—Eddy’s religious monomania and Twain’s trademark irreverence.

 

Director Treston Woods is at his best, threading the needle carefully. He manages to tell an at times dialogue-heavy, thematically weighty story that could easily have bogged down in the hands of a lesser director. Woods nails it with gripping pacing and powerful visual imagery.

 

The set must depict a daunting number of individual spaces, ranging from courtroom to living room to train to deathbed to 19th-century sanitarium and back again. Woods served as scenic designer. His set prowess is one of the Hill Country’s best-kept secrets. He knocks it out of the park with one of the most beautiful and versatile sets I’ve seen on a local stage in some time.

 

Performances were strong across the board, with standout turns by McGuff as Sam Clemens/Mark Twain, the man behind the magic, and Ann Reynolds in a tour de force as Mary Baker Eddy.

 

Reynolds has the evening’s most challenging assignment in portraying the elusive Mary Baker Eddy. It would be remarkably easy to flatten such a controversial historical figure into a one-note religious zealot — severe, unlikable and emotionally inaccessible — or to veer in the opposite direction and turn the performance into a didactic attempt to sell the audience on a particular theology.

 

Reynolds is far too intelligent an actor to fall for either trap. She simply allows the real historical Eddy to exist. She neither apologizes for her nor condemns her, trusting the audience to sit with the contradictions. Was Mary Baker Eddy a woman of profound, unwavering conviction? A gifted charlatan? Or a person whose firm belief and extraordinary powers of persuasion were so intertwined that separating one from the other is impossible? Neither Reynolds nor McGuff as playwright reaches for easy answers.

 

Her performance possesses an unaffected sincerity that lets those questions breathe, resisting caricature in favor of character. The result is a portrayal that feels terribly human, not because it resolves the mystery of Mary Baker Eddy, but because it understands that the mystery is exactly the point.

 

McGuff as Sam Clemens/Mark Twain similarly allows us to sit with the contradictions of the real human being without sitting in judgment. Robin Williams once commented that it is the funniest people — those who try hardest to make others laugh — who are frequently carrying the greatest burdens. McGuff's multifaceted Twain portrayal is evidence of that. He made me laugh and weep all at once.

 

As the framing character of the piece, McGuff is warm and relatable, hilarious and heartbreaking by turns, shot through with subtlety where stereotype would have been easier. This is not young Sam Clemens, but the aging Mark Twain who has faced the fire and won. McGuff is  a force to be reckoned with in this role and a local actor to watch.

 

A trio of supporting women serve as foils and counter-foils throughout. Chelsea McGuff (as Clara Clemens), Sarah Woods (Augusta Stetson) and Meg Booth in her polished stage debut as Twain’s enigmatic assistant Isabel Lyon—all deliver strong performances and serve as the bedrock of the piece. Their strength in standing up for their respective circumstances, no matter how seemingly at odds with Twain or Eddy, resists collapsing real people into caricatures and lends a reflective complexity and moral nuance to the piece. And Emory Cloud as George Glover/Dr. Peterson and Ken DeZarn as Calvin Frye serve well as characters who drive the action behind the scenes and keep the wheels of this Herculean venture spinning.

 

 

I would be remiss not to note one standout heartbreaker of a performance by supporting actor GlennAlise Saunier as Twain’s epileptic daughter Jean. Possibly suffering an additional neurodevelopmental disability or mental illness, Jean died young, as did several of Twain’s other children.

 

Jean is locked away in a sanitarium. Saunier seamlessly fuses grudging but sincere duty to family and father with a passionate, fiery mooring as she pleads passionately for release and her right to live outside an institution as a disabled person.

 

Saunier hits every mark and in almost every scene manages to lay foundational foreshadowing. Always three steps ahead of the material, she scatters Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs we eagerly gather. We follow her to the ultimate climax of the show, her rather gruesome demise, brilliantly acted and technically executed in silhouette.

 

McGuff’s acting transformation was stunning, too, but so was his prosthetics transformation into Twain. Although it’s hard to avoid a bit of an uncanny valley effect in any such effort, A Woman Clothed in the Sun With the Moon Under Her Feet avoids limiting his range of facial movement and at close range this was some of the best-looking prosthetic work I’ve seen locally.

 

Lighting, costumes and sound design were spot-on for the period and tone of the piece. The project crackled with the promise of future powerhouse productions by Yellow Lab.

 

This is admittedly a talky, cerebral piece. Talky and cerebral happen to suit me, and I enjoyed the script unreservedly from top to bottom. What every audience member found was a potent and stirring reflection on love and loss not soon to be forgotten. It never sacrifices substance for style and remains passionately, respectfully true to its source material.

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The Woman Clothed in the Sun with the Moon under her Feet
by David McGuff
Yellow Lab Productions

July 10 and 11, 2026

VK Garage Theater, Cailloux Art Center, Kerrville